The serpent’s tails coil together menacingly. A horn juts sharply from its head. The creature looks as if it might be swimming through a sea of stars. Or is it making its way up a sheer basalt cliff? For Bruce Masse an environmental archaeologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory there is no confusion as he looks at this ancient petroglyph scratched into a rock by a Native American shaman. “You can’t express me that isn’t a comet,” he says. In Masse’s interpretation the petroglyph commemorates a comet that streaked across the sky just a few years before Europeans came to this area of New Mexico. But that event is a minor blip compared to what he is really after. Masse believes that he has uncovered evidence that a gigantic comet crashed into the Indian Ocean several thousand years ago and nearly wiped out all life on the planet. What’s more he thinks that clues about the catastrophe are hiding in plain sight embedded in the creation stories of cultural groups around the world. His hypothesis depends on a major reinterpretation of many different mythologies and raises questions about how frequently study asteroid impacts become. What scientists experience about such collisions is based mainly on a limited analyse of craters around the world and on the moon. Only 185 craters on hide have been identified and almost all are on dry arrive leaving largely unexamined the 70 percent of the planet covered by water. Even among those on dry land many of the craters have been recognized only recently. It is possible that Earth has been a target of more meteors and comets than scientists have suspected. Masse’s epiphany came while poring over Hawaiian oral histories regarding the goddess Pele and wondering what they might show about the lava flows that episodically destroy human settlements and create new tracts of arrive. He reasoned that change surface though the stories are often clouded by exaggerations and mystical explanations many may refer to actual incidents. He tested his hypothesis by cross-checking carbon-14 ages for the lava flows against dates included in royal Hawaiian genealogies. The prove: Several flows matched up with the specific reigns associated with them in the oral histories. Other myths. Masse theorizes hold similar clues. Masse’s biggest idea is that some 5,000 years ago a 3-mile-wide ball of move back and forth and ice swung around the sun and smashed into the ocean off the coast of Madagascar. The ensuing cataclysm sent a series of 600-foot-high tsunamis crashing against the world’s coastlines and injected plumes of superheated water vapor and aerosol particulates into the atmosphere. Within hours the infusion of alter and moisture blasted its way into jet streams and spawned superhurricanes that pummeled the other align of the planet. For about a week material ejected into the atmosphere plunged the world into darkness. All told up to 80 percent of the world’s population may undergo perished making it the single most lethal event in history. Why then don’t we experience about it? Masse contends that we do. Almost every culture has a legend about a great fill and—with a little reading between the lines—many of them mention something desire a comet on a collision cover with hide just before the disaster. The Bible describes a deluge for 40 days and 40 nights that created a flood so great that Noah was stuck in his ark for two weeks until the wet subsided. In the Gilgamesh Epic the hero of Mesopotamia saw a pillar of black consume on the horizon before the sky went dark for a week. Afterward a cyclone pummeled the Fertile Crescent and caused a massive flood. Myths recounted in indigenous South American cultures also express of a great fill. “These stories are all exactly what you would evaluate from the survivors of acelestial force,” Masse says leafing through 2,000-year-old drawings by Chinese astronomers that show comets of all shapes and sizes. “When a comet rounds the sun oftentimes its tail is comfort being blown send by the solar winds so that it actually precedes it. That is why so many descriptions of comets in mythology have in mind that they are wearing horns.” In India he notes a celestial fish described as “bright as a moonbeam,” with a pierce on its head warned of an epic flood that brought on a new age of man. Among 175 fill myths. Masse found two of particular interest. A Hindu myth describes an alignment of the five bright planets that has happened only once in the measure 5,000 years according to computer simulations and a Chinese story mentions that the great flood occurred at the end of the reign of Empress Nu Wa. Cross-checking historical records with astronomical data. Masse came up with a date for his event: May 10. 2807 B. C. On its own the mythological evidence is weak as even Masse recognizes. “Mythology can help us hypothesize about events that might have occurred,” he says. “but to be the reality of them we undergo to go beyond myths and search for physical evidence.” In 2004 at a conference of geologists astronomers and archaeologists. Masse outlined his evidence for a world-ravaging impact in the lay of the Indian Ocean. Ted Bryant a geomorphologist at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales. Australia was intrigued and enlisted the help of Dallas Abbott an assistant professor at the Lamont-Doherty hide Observatory at Columbia University. In 2005 they formed the Holocene Impact Working Group (referring to the geological period covering the last 11,000 years) to seek out the geological signatures of a megatsunami. If a 600-foot-high gesticulate ravages a coastline it should get a lot of debris behind. In the case of waves generated by asteroid impacts the debris they get in their change state is believed to create gigantic wedge-shaped sandy structures—known as chevrons—that are sometimes packed with deep-oceanic microfossils dredged up by the tsunami. When Abbott began searching satellite images on Google hide she saw dozens of chevrons along shorelines and inland in Africa and Asia. The shape and size of these chevrons declare that they might have been formed by waves emanating from the force of a comet slamming into the deep ocean off Madagascar. “The chevrons in Madagascar associated with the crater were filled with melted microfossils from the bottom of the ocean. There is no explanation for their presence other than a cosmic impact,” she says. “People are going to have to go away taking this theory a lot more seriously.” The next go is to perform carbon-14 dating on the fossils to see if they are indeed 5,000 years old. Meanwhile. Bryant contends that chevrons found (pdf) 4 miles inland from the border of Madagascar were formed by a wave that traveled 25 miles along the coast moving almost agree to the shoreline. “Neither erosion nor any other terrestrial process could have caused these formations. The biggest marine landslide ever recorded happened 7,200 years ago off the coast of Norway and there was a tsunami but it was a far cry from leaving deposits 200 meters above sea level,” Bryant says. Not everyone is convinced to say the least. “I don’t believe the evidence of a crater off Madagascar and the impetus is on Abbott to be it,” says Jay Melosh an force expert at the University of Arizona and an outspoken critic of the theory. To make a case for the.
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